Activists say Israeli troops have boarded aid ship
Activists say Israeli troops have boarded a ship trying to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
More mass casualties near Gaza food points as GHF says five staff killed
The bloody chaos that has overtaken food distribution in Gaza has worsened with more mass casualties among Palestinians trying to reach humanitarian assistance, while the US-Israeli organisation tasked with deliveries claimed that five of its local workers had been killed by Hamas. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) said on Thursday that a bus full of its Palestinian staff was attacked by Hamas at 10pm local time on Wednesday, with at least five deaths and other workers taken hostage. It was not immediately clear why the organisation was attempting a night-time delivery. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have warned Palestinians not to approach food distribution points before 6am. The GHF reportedly claimed on its Arabic Facebook page that it had carried out a 3am food distribution. The GHF did not respond to inquiries about the night distribution but its newly appointed chair, the evangelical preacher and Trump adviser Johnnie Moore, said on social media: 'These dear people were murdered by Hamas because they just wanted to feed their people. They were not militants. They were humanitarians, many of them young people. 'The principle of impartiality does not mean neutrality. There is good and evil in this world. What we are doing is good and what Hamas did to these Gazans is absolute evil.' Hamas has not commented on the GHF claims, but said it had killed 12 members of the Israeli-backed Abu Shabab after detaining them overnight. Reports from Khan Younis in southern Gaza said Abu Shabab members were publicly executed overnight in the city. There have been increasingly bloody clashes in recent days between Hamas and the militia led by an Israeli-backed local warlord, Yasser abu Shabab. Israeli forces killed at least 60 Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday, nearly two-thirds of them as they were seeking food from GHF food points, according to local health authorities. There were more mass casualties reported on Thursday morning. The Palestinian civil defence agency told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Israeli forces had killed 22 people across Gaza, of whom 16 had been waiting to collect aid. The distribution of food and basic supplies in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip has become increasingly fraught and perilous, exacerbating the territory's deep hunger crisis. A civil defence official, Mohammed al-Mughayyir, told AFP that al-Awda hospital received 10 dead and about 200 wounded, including women and children, 'after Israeli drones dropped multiple bombs on gatherings of civilians near an aid distribution point around the Netzarim checkpoint in central Gaza'. In parallel with the GHF effort, Israel has begun allowing limited UN food aid to enter Gaza for the first time in three months after the mass casualties since the attempt to set up the militarised US-Israeli alternative. The IDF said on Thursday morning that 56 humanitarian aid trucks from the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) had crossed into Gaza the previous day through the Zikim crossing at the northern end of the occupied territory. The food was allowed in 'with the approval of the political echelon and on the recommendation of the security authorities', an IDF statement said. The WFP confirmed it had been able to get some food into Gaza over the past few days but not to distribute it in any organised way. After several incidents of looting, the aid agency has been driving trucks into populated areas and allowing local people to unload the food themselves. Coverage of the war in Gaza is constrained by Israeli attacks on Palestinian journalists and a bar on international reporters entering the Gaza Strip to report independently on the war. Israel has not allowed foreign reporters to enter Gaza since 7 October 2023, unless they are under Israeli military escort. Reporters who join these trips have no control over where they go, and other restrictions include a bar on speaking to Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinian journalists and media workers inside Gaza have paid a heavy price for their work reporting on the war, with over 180 killed since the conflict began. The committee to protect journalists has determined that at least 19 of them 'were directly targeted by Israeli forces in killings which CPJ classifies as murders'. Foreign reporters based in Israel filed a legal petition seeking access to Gaza, but it was rejected by the supreme court on security grounds. Private lobbying by diplomats and public appeals by prominent journalists and media outlets have been ignored by the Israeli government. To ensure accurate reporting from Gaza given these restrictions, the Guardian works with trusted journalists on the ground; our visual teams verify photo and videos from third parties; and we use clearly sourced data from organisations that have a track record of providing accurate information in Gaza during past conflicts, or during other conflicts or humanitarian crises. Emma Graham-Harrison, chief Middle East correspondent 'Since the limited resumption of humanitarian assistance into Gaza on 19 May, WFP has been able to bring only small amounts of food into Gaza. This is largely due to delays or denials of permission for humanitarian movements due to expanded military operations,' the WFP said in a statement. It said fewer than 7,000 metric tonnes of aid had entered Gaza by 11 June. Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza on 9 March, partially lifting it in May for the WFP and GHF supplies, but it will not allow the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, to carry out distribution. Unrwa has by far the biggest aid distribution network in Gaza but it has been banned by Israel on the grounds of allegations of complicity with Hamas. After an internal investigation, Unrwa fired nine of its 13,000 employees in Gaza in August 2024 on suspicion of involvement in the Hamas attack the previous October, but found no evidence to substantiate Israel's broader claims. Israel cut all ties with Unrwa in January, with backing from the Trump administration. The GHF is intended to be a substitute for Unrwa but its method of delivering food to a limited number of sites in heavily militarised areas has led to more than 160 deaths since it began operations two weeks ago, as Israeli forces have opened fire on desperate Palestinians trying to reach the food distribution points. The GHF's plan to set up a militarised food delivery system was criticised by humanitarian experts and its first director resigned because he said the scheme ran counter to 'humanitarian principles'. 'The so-called new way of handling assistance in Gaza is most degrading, humiliating and puts lives in danger,' Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa said on social media. 'This 'model' will not address the deepening hunger. The dystopian 'Hunger Games' cannot become the new reality. The UN including Unrwa have the knowledge, expertise & community trust to provide dignified and safe assistance. Just let the humanitarians do their jobs.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Family pleads for the release of a Nepali student abducted by Hamas
The family of a Nepali man taken captive by the Palestinian militant group Hamas appealed Thursday to his captors for his release, stressing that he has no involvement in the conflict in Gaza. Bipin Joshi, now 25, was among 17 Nepali students studying agriculture in southern Israel during the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack that ignited the war in Gaza. Joshi had worked hard in a government competition to earn a spot to study in Israel, his 17-year-old sister Pushpa Joshi said Thursday in Kathmandu. He arrived in southern Israel just three weeks before the attack. It was his first time out of Nepal. 'Bipin Joshi is an innocent agriculture student,' Pushpa Joshi said. 'He is a student who has a long life ahead of him, who is just 25 years now.' Militants killed 10 of the Nepali students in the attack and injured six. Joshi saved multiple lives by tossing a live grenade out of the bomb shelter where they were hiding, his sister said, before he was abducted and taken to Gaza. His family hasn't had a sign of life from him since Israel obtained security footage from a hospital in Gaza showing Joshi, so they know Joshi was taken alive to Gaza, but have no information about him since then. Pushpa, who was 15 when her brother was kidnapped, lives with their parents in a town in western Nepal. She travels eight hours each direction on buses to Kathmandu regularly to lobby officials to secure her brother's release. She has met the country's prime minister and president several times. Nepal's government says it has repeatedly sought help from Qatari and Egyptian officials to get Joshi freed. 'He is alive and we believe from the bottom of our hearts that he for sure is going to come back all safe and sound,' Pushpa said. 'We have big hopes that he will be back.' Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages in the Oct. 7 attack. They are still holding 53 hostages, around 20 them believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals. Israeli forces have rescued eight living hostages from Gaza and recovered dozens of bodies, including five over the past week. In the ensuing conflict, more than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed 'doubts' about whether several hostages are still alive. None of the previously released hostages have seen Bipin Joshi recently during their captivity. His parents are constantly monitoring news about the Gaza conflict, and get their hopes up whenever they see signs of a hostage release. 'News is always on, all day from the morning to night, at our house,' Pushpa Joshi said. They also are in contact with families of other Nepalis who were killed or injured in the attack, though Joshi is the only Nepali hostage. Pushpa said her brother is her best friend, and that they would often learn, sing and dance together while their parents were at work. 'In rainy season like now, we used to get wet in the rain and dance,' she said. He studied diligently to earn the scholarship to study agriculture in Israel, she said. The exchange program at Kibbutz Alumim was close to the Gaza border in a major agricultural area. Nepalese go to Israel for both education and employment, to learn the country's advanced agricultural techniques. Agriculture is the backbone of Nepal's economy, and the primary source of income for more than 60% of the population. —- Associated Press writer Melanie Lidman contributed from Jerusalem.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Attack dogs: how Europe supplies Israel with brutal canine weapons
It was only seconds after soldiers entered the Hashash family's home in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank that the dog attack began. As military raids rolled out across her neighbourhood one morning in February 2023, Amani Hashash says she took her four children into a bedroom. When she heard Israeli military coming into their home she called out that they were inside and posed no threat. Moments later the bedroom door was opened and a large, unmuzzled dog launched itself into the room, plunging its teeth into her three-year-old son, Ibrahim, who was asleep in her lap. Hashash fought to get the animal away as it mauled and shook her screaming son and started to drag him out of the room. 'But it was such a big dog, not like any other dog I have seen,' she says. 'It kept biting and pulling my son away from me. I screamed and hit it, but it kept pulling at him.' She says she begged the soldiers to call off the attack but they couldn't control the animal. By the time they managed to drag the dog away, Ibrahim was unconscious and bleeding heavily. The soldiers injected Ibrahim with sedatives and called an ambulance, which took him to hospital where he was rushed into surgery. 'When I saw his wounds I was distraught because they were so extensive,' says Hashash. 'The doctors said his condition was critical. One wound was six and a half centimetres, another was four centimetres. There were so many wounds the dog had caused, it hadn't left any of Ibrahim's back untouched.' Ibrahim needed 42 stitches for internal and external injuries and 21 injections to treat an infection contracted from the bites. Photoraphs of the injuries sustained in the attack seen by the Guardian and ARIJ show extensive wounding and bite marks. More than a year later, Hashash says Ibrahim still has nightmares and his wounds have not healed. 'They did this to terrorise us,' she says. Hashash says one of the Israeli commanders had told herthat the dog had been trained to attack the first person it saw. 'He's just a child,' she says. 'He hasn't done anything wrong.' The IDF refused to comment on the case. The dog that attacked Ibrahim is likely to have been a Belgian malinois, which Hashash identified from pictures of different dogs used by the military. Originally used to herd sheep, the breed is now widely used by Oketz, Israel's specialist canine unit, feted in Israel and widely feared across the Palestinian territories. According to an investigation by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and the Guardian, it is also likely that the animal used was sent to Israel from Europe, where a steady flow of dogs are traded from specialist trainers into the ranks of the Israeli military. Last year, commanders in the Oketz unit told US urban warfare researcher John Spencer, who has embedded with the IDF on multiple operations, that 99% of the approximately 70 military dogs it buys every year were sourced from companies in Europe, a figure that the IDF did not dispute when asked to confirm. Oketz insists it only deploys attack dogs in anti-terrorism operations, human rights organisations inside Gaza and the West Bank say the use of the animals to attack, terrorise and humiliate Palestinian civilians has increased since the beginning of the war in Gaza, leading to multiple injuries and some fatalities. One organisation, Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, says it has documented 146 cases of attack dogs being usedagainst civilians by the Israeli army since October 2023. In one incident, in July 2024, an IDF dog attacked Muhammed Bhar, a young man with Down's syndrome and autism, at his home in Shejaiya in Gaza City. In the aftermath of the attack, IDF soldiers forced his family out of their home, leaving Bhar to die alone of his wounds. A video published in June 2024 that appeared to show an Israeli military dog attacking Dawlat Al Tanani, a 68-year-old woman, in her home in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, leaving her with injuries. Animal welfare experts have criticised the weaponising of dogs by training them to attack civilians, calling the process 'a moral violation'. Dogs reportedly undergo extensive training with Oketz after they arrive in Israel before being deployed in operations. Charities have also raised concern about the high numbers of dogs dying in military operations. In January, Israeli military reports said the Oketz unit had lost 42 military dogs, since the beginning of the war on Gaza, although online references to the number of Oketz dogs who have died have recently been removed. 'It is unethical to turn dogs, which are naturally social creatures, into instruments of aggression to be used in wars that are solely caused by humans,' says animal behaviour expert Dr Jonathan Balcombe. 'Dogs don't choose to fight, they are made victims in conflicts they don't understand.' Tahrir Husni was pregnant when she says Israeli soldiers stormed her house in Khan Younis in 2023 and set a dog on her, which then mauled her in an attack that lasted more than 10 minutes. 'It was so big, it was impossible to push or kick it away,' she says. 'When it was attacking me, I lost all feeling in my leg. When it was over, I sat down on the couch and then I could see my blood and flesh all over the floor.' Husni says hours later she miscarried. 'I lost the child I'd waited six years for,' she says. 'My leg is so disfigured I can't bear to look at it. I can't walk, and the pain is always there.' Sign up to Global Dispatch Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team after newsletter promotion In the West Bank, the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq has also documented 18 cases of military dog attacks on civilians since October 2023, including children. The UN says that the use of military dogs against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention throughout the war constitutes a violation of international human rights law. According to testimonies from former detainees reported by Physicians for Human Rights, dogs have been ordered to bite and maul prisoners and urinated and defecated on them. Amnesty International says that the use of dogsagainst civilians needs to be urgently recognised in legal instruments and laws regulating the use and sale of conventional weapons. 'They should be part of international treaties regulating the use [of weapons], to stop them being used in violation of human rights,' says Patrick Wilcken, an expert on military and security issues at Amnesty. 'There is a clear risk that these exports help to promote practices that violate international and human rights law, so companies and states should seriously consider whether their activities are linked to unlawful acts committed by Israel.' Richard Falk, a former UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, says European companies should stop exporting military dogs to Israel, adding that continuing to do so makes them complicit in human rights abuses. 'From the perspective of general international law, I have no doubt whatsoever that companies exporting these dogs are complicit, because they know exactly how they are used,' says Falk. The investigation found that a large number of military and police dogs have been sent to Israel by companies in Germany and the Netherlands since the war in Gaza began. The Animal and Plant Health Agency has confirmed 294 dogs were exported from the UK to Israel as pets between February 2022 and December 2024, but says it does not track their breed or purpose. Other countries such as Belgium and the Czech Republic that export dogs to Israel also say they do not have details on what breeds were sent or whether they were trained as military animals. Under current EU regulations, such dogs are not classified as strategic or controlled dual-use items or weapons and therefore do not require export licences, and governments do not have to keep records of numbers exported and for what purposes. According to documents obtained by the Dutch Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations thinktank (Somo) , the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) issued 110 veterinary certificates between October 2023 and February 2025. These are the documents required for the export of dogs to Israel by Dutch companies specialising in military and police canines. Of these certificates 100 were granted to the company Four Winds K9, a police dog training centre in the Dutch village of Geffen. Four Winds K9 and the NVWA declined to comment on the export of trained dogs to Israel. The German company it exported Belgian malinois and German shepherd dogs to Israel between 2020 and 2024. The company denies they were used for 'protection or offensive purposes', saying they were for explosives and narcotics detection only, and that the company excluded any training or sale of dogs for protection or offensive purposes in full compliance with German law. ARIJ approached the European Commission for information on EU exports of military dogs to Israel but it says it does not have this information. In a statement, the Israeli military said, 'The IDF, including the Oketz unit, employs all necessary operational tools required to address threats in the field – this is conducted in accordance with binding orders, operational ethics, and international law. The IDF does not use dogs for punitive purposes or to harm civilians. All use of dogs is based solely on clear operational necessity, under close supervision, and following comprehensive training for both fighters and dogs alike.' The IDF said that it places 'great importance on the wellbeing of the operational dogs – who are an integral part of the combat apparatus – and the unit continues to operate with constant efforts to minimise harm to all components of the force, including its dogs.'Additional reporting by Aziza Nofal, Zarifa Hassan and Tom Levitt
